Making a native Windows bootable USB stick (Part 3)

Introduction

In Part 1 we covered how to make a very basic native Windows bootable image and Part 2 went further to show customisation methods. In this part I’ll discuss some further enhancements we can make, namely:

Adding drivers

Adding a Start menu

Making a multi-image bootable

Adding Drivers

Over the (many) years that I’ve been making Windows bootables, frequently used for recovery purposes on physical devices, the need to add drivers to the images has reduced greatly since each Windows release seems to cope better with the array of PCs, Servers and laptops that I encounter (or perhaps there is less and less “exotic” hardware out there). However, given the extracted driver package for a specific device, e.g. storage controller or network card (note that wireless doesn’t work out of the box with Windows PE), it is incredibly easy to add the drivers to the bootable image once it has been mounted, to c:\temp\wimp in this case, which we covered in part 2. So to add the drivers simply run the following command once your wim file has been mounted:

Dism /Image:C:\temp\wimp /Add-Driver /Driver:C:\drivers\mydriver.inf

This should then parse the driver’s .inf file specified and copy all of the required files from the specified folder into the mounted image. If you have more than one driver to add and they are in a folder hierarchy then you can use a single command to add them all – use the /Recurse option instead of /Driver. If any of the drivers are unsigned then using the /ForceUnsigned option may help.

To see what 3rd party, as in non-Microsoft, drivers are in your image run the following:

Dism /Image:C:\test\wimp /Get-Drivers

Once you have finished adding drivers then remember to commit and unmount the image so that the changes you have made are written back to the .wim file and then make the bootable USB or ISO as before although for USB all you need to do is to copy the updated boot.wim file into the \sources folder.

Adding a Start Menu

Given that the out of the box experience with vanilla WinPE is a command prompt which not everyone is comfortable with, an easy way to provide a Windows style start menu is to use the excellent Nu2menu tool. It uses a simple XML configuration file to build a menu of tools – when adding a new tool I usually just copy and paste an existing entry and then modify it as necessary. There are sample XML snippets on the site and one in the download zip file. This then can look something like the following which also shows you the sorts of utilities that can be worth obtaining/purchasing to put into your recovery suite, such as the excellent Explorer++:

To launch nu2menu.exe automatically at boot, my startnet.cmd file simple has the following line:

start "" \programs\nu2menu\nu2menu.exe

Where \programs\nu2menu is a folder in the .wim image where I have copied the nu2menu executable, xml configuration file and the image to use for the start menu button itself which is in a file “nu2go.bmp”.

Making a multi-image bootable

So now we have the knowledge to create an all singing, all dancing, Windows PE bootable that can be used for all kinds of things Windows wise but what if I’ve got a physical Linux system I need to do some offline servicing of? This is where we can add grub4dos to the existing bootable media, so USB drives have to be FAT32 format rather than NTFS, to allow other operating systems to be booted such as Linux and DOS by the following steps:

Rename “bootmgr” to “bootmgr8”

Extract Grub4Dos grldr and menu.lst to the root of the bootable media from here

Rename grldr to bootmgr

Modify the menu.lst file as required (see below)

For example, the following entry in menu.lst will give an option to boot your existing WinPE image:

title WinPE plus BartPE

find --set-root /bootmgr8

chainloader /bootmgr8

And the following will boot an Ubuntu (I used build 14.04, 64 bit) ISO image /Ubuntu.iso already present on the media:

Note that as it is booting from the ISO which it loads into memory first, it can be quite slow to boot on physical systems and can spend several minutes at the stage below:

It does however have the advantage that because no files need to be extracted to the bootable media from the ISO then it can be updated with a newer ISO simply by copying any new ISO over the top of the old one on the bootable media.

To boot to DOS (very occasionally I need this for tasks like BIOS updates on very old systems), I have the following:

title DosFlashDisk

kernel /dos/memdisk

initrd /dos/idecdrom.img

Where the idecdrom.img file is a 1.44MB floppy disk image I created years ago from an actual floppy disk and memdisk comes from here. You may be able to obtain a FreeDOS image if you don’t have a bootable floppy disk and drive from which to make an image.

Note also that we can have multiple WinPE images booting from the same USB/ISO, e.g. 32 and 64 bit variants although I usually just have a 32 bit variant since that works fine on 64 bit systems, by using bcdedit to manipulate the \boot\BCD file on the USB stick (not in the .wim file itself). To show the current boot entries simply run the following (where G: is my USB stick mount point):

bcdedit /store G:\boot\bcd

We can then create new entries and modify them to point to other .wim files on our boot media. See here for a quick guide to using bcdedit for this but remember to always to also specify the /store option as well so that bcdedit manipulates the bcd file on the boot media and not your local Windows system!

That’s all for now folks – have fun making bootable media!

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Author: guyrleech

I wrote my first (Basic) program in 1980, was a Unix developer after graduation from Manchester University and then became a consultant, initially with Citrix WinFrame, in 1995 and later into Terminal Server/Services and more recently virtualisation, being awarded the VMware vExpert status in 2009 and 2010. I have also had various stints in Technical Pre-Sales, Support and R&D.
I work as a Senior Technical Consultant for HCL, live in West Yorkshire, England; have a wife, three children and three dogs and am a keen competitive runner when not injured.
View all posts by guyrleech